Scapino Ballet Rotterdam is a historic dance company with an audience that skews older and affluent. The brief asked for a product that uses the educational and social side of dance to reach people in their twenties, with one condition attached: research the problem first, then design and code a working solution. I worked on the development side of the answer, an interactive poster that runs on a webcam and a vertical screen.
The research
Desk research into Scapino's own channels and an online survey among twenty-somethings pointed the same way. Visual appeal and exposure were not the problem. The gap was personal relevance: nobody in that age group saw themselves in modern dance. Two personas and one how-might-we question came out of the analysis: how might we make people in their twenties connect with modern dance, so that they attend a performance at Scapino Ballet? Three motivators carried the concept from there: personal relevance, shared experiences and authentic storytelling.
The concept
A poster that talks first. It stands where the audience already is and opens with a dancer's story instead of a season programme. Would you quit a top-tier company to be free? She did. Put your hands up and she tells you how. Once the story lands, the poster turns the question around: how far would you go to chase your passion? The answer is not typed. It is drawn.
Hands as the interface
The poster runs as a web app inside an Electron kiosk shell, with ml5.js reading the visitor's hands through a webcam above the screen. There is no touch and no menu. A thumbs up or down answers a yes-or-no, holding both hands together for three seconds starts the generator, and the distance between two open hands drives the artwork: the further apart, the longer the word FAR stretches and the more brush strokes land on the canvas. Every gesture shows a visible timer so people know the poster is listening, and a marker on the floor tells them where to stand.
Art you can take home
The session ends with the visitor's own artwork on screen and a ticket coming out of a printer beside the stand. The ticket carries the artwork, the sentence they made and a QR code to a companion website, where the dancers' stories continue and a performance ticket is one tap away. A physical object made in public is the kind of thing people show to friends, which is exactly the shared experience the research asked for.
Tested in the room
We tested it ourselves first, then with users on the real setup, and changed the build after each round. The clip below is the final prototype from testing day.